Thing 4: current awareness

Twitter
As a heavy Twitter user already I'm finding it quite hard to step back from it and actually consider its usefulness as a current awareness tool. I suppose it's a fairly strong endorsement to say that I can't imagine my life without Twitter! I follow around 500 people, probably half of whom are from the library world, and I would say that between them they do tend to clue me in to most of what's going on. However, I would definitely miss out on things if I ONLY relied on Twitter. It's easy to get lost in an online echo chamber and forget all the things that are happening/being talked about elsewhere. So I also use good old-fashioned JISCMail (LIS-LINK, UKCoRR etc), library journals and magazines including CILIP Update/Gazette, the national and international media, and personal connections.

Two things I would say to Twitter sceptics:
1) you get out what you put in, and it's just as much about engagement as about current awareness
2) USE LISTS (and probably saved searches as well) or you have no chance of staying on top of things

RSS
Again, I'm a big RSS user. I subscribe to around 30 blogs, sites and podcasts via Google Reader and Google Listen, and around 40 via Netvibes. I'm not quite sure any more why I have two different readers on the go - I think Netvibes started as a place to hive off the library content that was most relevant to my job as I thought it might turn into a public web channel. I like both services and they are brilliant for current awareness as I can scan my feeds in a fraction of the time it would take to visit all the individual sites. I also like being able to mark, share and organise my feeds.

I've also been thinking about RSS in relation to Thing 3 - remembering that having a lovely looking blog with a strong visual brand is all very well, but if someone is viewing it via RSS they are not going to be seeing any of that. Similarly, most people following you on Twitter will just see your posts in their own stream/on their chosen client rather than spending a lot of time on your carefully designed profile page. Web 2.0 is all about syndication and personalisation, so when we create content we are not necessarily in control of how people receive or view it...

Pushnote
Ooh new toy! I do generally like to try out new Web 2.0 tools (Google+, anyone?) but Pushnote seems on first impressions a bit fiddly and underwhelming. I'm not sure I like ranking tools anyway - too reductive - although I did like the idea of reading comments from other users. Part of the problem is also the Catch-22 of social media - it only really starts to make sense once lots of people are using it, but that needs enough of us take the plunge in the first place. The only person using Pushnote I have found so far who I recognise is bethanar! So I think for now I prefer bookmarking tools like Delicious, which lets me organise, tag and share pages in a slightly simpler way. But I'll play with Pushnote a bit more I'm sure.